Episode 107: Was Popper a Fideist?

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Unofficial, reviewed transcript. It may still contain mistakes; check the podcast when wording matters.

Speakers are labeled by first name where identified. Unidentified-speaker labels may refer to different people. Bracketed question marks indicate uncertain wording.

Transcript

[00:00:00]  Unidentified speaker: Hello out there.

[00:00:02]  Peter: This week on The Theory of Anything Podcast, we discuss Fideism, or at least I think how Bruce is defining it, the idea that faith has some central role related to moving towards truth through rationality. Our starting point is a paper written by prominent Popperian Joseph Agassi about how William Bartley, another critical rationalist philosopher closely associated with Popper, had a falling out with Popper after he accused him of being a Fideist, which Popper apparently did not consider a compliment. It's actually kind of crazy how this ties in directly to our last episode, where we discussed an obscure interview with Popper, where he talks about faith and religion. During that discussion, Bruce declared himself to be a kind of Fideist, which was a new term to me, but I swear we had no plan to discuss Agassi's paper on Karl Popper and Fideism next. So this was a happy accident, and I'm so pleased with how this turned out, and I hope someone out there gets something out of this too.

[00:01:18]  Unidentified speaker: Welcome to The Theory of Anything podcast.

[00:01:19]  Bruce: Hey, Peter.

[00:01:20]  Peter: Hello, Bruce.

[00:01:21]  Unidentified speaker: How are you today?

[00:01:22]  Unidentified speaker: Good.

[00:01:23]  Bruce: This is a fun episode that we're gonna do today. And in typical Bruce fashion, it started off as reading a paper and wanting to discuss it. And then I ended up with like pages and pages and pages of notes of what I wanted to talk about.

[00:01:37]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:01:38]  Bruce: I think my notes are longer than the original paper at this point.

[00:01:42]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, sure.

[00:01:42]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, that's typical.

[00:01:44]  Peter: That is typical, Bruce.

[00:01:47]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[00:01:48]  Bruce: Well, this is an awesome subject. So it's about a paper by from Joseph Agassi.

[00:01:57]  Unidentified speaker: I got to get that name right.

[00:01:58]  Unidentified speaker: Agassi.

[00:02:00]  Bruce: And I've always in the past called Joseph Agassi, the Gilderoy Lockhart of critical rationalism. However, there's one really big difference between him and Gilderoy Lockhart. Agassi is actually every bit as talented as he believed himself to be. So, I mean, this is a really smart, talented guy. And the reason why I called him the Gilderoy Lockhart of critical rationalism was when he's in an interview, he'll just sort of throw out in the middle of the interview, well, I've invented two different branches of philosophy that then got stolen from somebody else, and now somebody else has credit. You know, like he says these funny things, which are probably true, by the way, like I'm not actually saying he's lying or something like that.

[00:02:46]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:02:47]  Bruce: But just it comes across really funny because you're just not used to people talking that way.

[00:02:52]  Peter: You're thinking of those interviews on the Parperian podcast.

[00:02:56]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:02:59]  Bruce: So his paper is called Critical Rationalism, Comprehensive or Qualified, The Popper-Bartley Dispute. And he gives his take on what happened to cause a fallout between Popper and Bartley. Note that Agassi actually knew both men and was present for some of what happened. So according to Agassi, he himself had fallouts with Popper. So we're talking about someone who understood that Popper was a difficult person, if that makes any sense.

[00:03:29]  Peter: Well, I mean, I think just about everyone had a falling out with him, didn't they?

[00:03:33]  Unidentified speaker: David Miller didn't.

[00:03:34]  Bruce: That's why I consider David Miller kind of Popper's torch. He just passed away recently, but before he passed away, that's why I always referred to him as the greatest living Popperian.

[00:03:44]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:03:46]  Bruce: So what did you think of this paper?

[00:03:48]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, geez.

[00:03:48]  Peter: Well, there was a lot of interesting things about it. Like I said, it was quite confusing.

[00:03:55]  Unidentified speaker: Yes, it's totally confusing.

[00:03:57]  Peter: You know, but maybe I can kind of summarize what I got from it, which might be just a small part of what he was getting at.

[00:04:06]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, go for it.

[00:04:08]  Peter: So this Bartley, who's a pretty prominent critical rationalist himself,

[00:04:15]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:04:15]  Peter: accused Popper of being a Fideist.

[00:04:20]  Bruce: Yes, which in the last episode I recorded, I claimed I was a Fideist.

[00:04:24]  Unidentified speaker: So that's a coincidence.

[00:04:25]  Bruce: That's a really interesting thing that came up in this paper.

[00:04:27]  Peter: Which is someone who prioritizes faith over reason, right, as a fundamental.

[00:04:37]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, it seems like it's one of these things.

[00:04:38]  Peter: There's about five different definitions of it.

[00:04:41]  Unidentified speaker: I totally agree.

[00:04:43]  Unidentified speaker: There's like a bunch of definitions.

[00:04:44]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:04:45]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:04:45]  Peter: In this context, I guess he's accusing Popper of believing that something like, that in order to really believe or to subscribe or however you want to put it, to critical rationalism, you have to have something like a faith in some fundamental precept of that reason is valuable. So it's like either it's based on a foundation of faith, which Popper was very offended by and didn't think was fair at all.

[00:05:18]  Bruce: Just to clarify, what you said was correct, but it was a little bit confusing.

[00:05:22]  Unidentified speaker: OK.

[00:05:23]  Bruce: Popper did say that, but he did not consider himself a Fideist.

[00:05:27]  Unidentified speaker: OK, OK.

[00:05:28]  Bruce: Called the Fideist, offended Popper.

[00:05:30]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:05:31]  Unidentified speaker: OK, I got it.

[00:05:33]  Unidentified speaker: But it sounded like.

[00:05:35]  Peter: Agassi in this article, at least how I interpreted him, is kind of like owning that in a way and saying that in order to the critical rationalism actually is based on a faith in reason. And he defends it from both from skeptics and pragmatists and and others who are critical of, who think that this is some kind of like criticism, checkmate kind of criticism of critical rationalism and saying he seems to be saying that it's, it's not so bad. Is that on the right track at least?

[00:06:22]  Bruce: So it's interesting that that's what you got out of it, because I actually got the opposite out of it.

[00:06:26]  Unidentified speaker: Well, I'm probably wrong then.

[00:06:27]  Bruce: So no, no, no, I don't think you necessarily are.

[00:06:30]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:06:30]  Bruce: So I actually took away from it that he's claiming Popper was wrong that you needed to start with faith to be a critical rationalist.

[00:06:40]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:06:40]  Bruce: The problem is that he kind of says both. And Agassi has this style that's very, and some of his other papers are exactly like this, right?

[00:06:53]  Unidentified speaker: Where it's very roundabout.

[00:06:55]  Bruce: He doesn't just state what he's saying. And so it's really hard to tell if he was claiming Popper was right or Popper was wrong. And I think I can totally see why you came away thinking that he was saying Popper was sort of right because he kind of says that. But I can also see why I came away thinking he was saying Popper was wrong because he kind of says that. And it's a little unclear which he intended. And I think that might be by design, right? That it's not just that he's an unclear writer. He's trying to make you think, but he's not necessarily coming up with a definitive answer, right? So you have to read between the lines and come up with what you think he intended. And I guess I can see how there's more than one way you could read between the lines and come up with a different point of view. So I'm actually going to offer some quotes from him that will support your view and some that support my view.

[00:07:54]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:07:54]  Bruce: So that's why I think it's actually probably good that you read it one way and I read it another way so that we've got two opinions on this subject. And that's probably exactly how it should be.

[00:08:04]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:08:06]  Bruce: So I looked up on Wikipedia. So I looked up on Wikipedia the their account of the Popper Bartley blow up.

[00:08:15]  Unidentified speaker: And here's what it says.

[00:08:17]  Bruce: At the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science at Bedford College, University of London, July 11th to 17th, 1965, they came into conflict with each other. Bartley had presented a paper, Theories of Demarcation between Science and Metaphysics, in which he accused Popper of displaying a positivist attitude in his early works and proposed that Popper's demarcation criterion was not as important as Popper thought it was. Popper took this as a personal attack, and Bartley took his reply as indicating that Popper was ignoring his criticism. Their friendship was not restored until 1974, after the publication of The Philosophy of Karl Popper. Bartley changed the tone of his remarks about Popper's criterion of demarcation, making it less aggressive. However, despite the restored friendship, Bartley's view was never accepted by Popper, who criticized it even after Bartley's death. So let me say that from talking with crit rats about this, it seems like crit rats are pretty much entirely in the Bartley camp here. I've seen crit rats say something like, well, Popper wanted to claim an uncriticizable foundation for rationalism, and Bartley, rightly, didn't accept that. But it should be noted that this is basically just Bartley's view in a nutshell. And I would personally consider it a straw man, at least to a degree, of Popper's actual view. I think Agassi's paper can be quite helpful in trying to understand what the dispute was actually about.

[00:09:52]  Unidentified speaker: There may have been more than one thing it was about.

[00:09:54]  Bruce: Okay, so before I go too much further, let me actually just read in full what Popper actually said that led to all this. Okay, so this is from page 436 of Open Society and Its Enemies.

[00:10:10]  Unidentified speaker: This would be the one volume edition.

[00:10:13]  Bruce: I think that page number might be the PDF page number, by the way.

[00:10:16]  Unidentified speaker: I don't think I checked the book page number.

[00:10:19]  Bruce: So here is a quote from Popper. Whoever adopts the rationalist attitude does so because he has adopted consciously or unconsciously some proposal or decision or belief or behavior, an adoption which may be called irrational. Whether this adoption is tentative or leads to a settled habit, we may describe it as an irrational faith in reason. So rationalism is necessarily far from comprehensive or self-contained. This has frequently, frequently been overlooked by rationalists who thus expose themselves to a beating in their own field and by their own favorite weapon, whenever an irrationalist took the trouble to turn it against them.

[00:11:05]  Unidentified speaker: So that's one quote.

[00:11:06]  Unidentified speaker: Let me give another one.

[00:11:07]  Bruce: This is from Conjecture and Refutation. I don't have a page number, but it's the chapter entitled, Chapter 18, Utopia and Violence. He says, if I don't have a page number, it probably means I got it from AI Karl Popper and that the program didn't have a page number, wasn't able to find a page number. So he says, I think I have said enough to make clear what I intend to convey by calling myself a rationalist. My rationalism is not dogmatic. I fully admit that I cannot rationally prove it. I frankly confess that I choose rationalism because I hate violence. And I do not deceive myself into believing that this hatred has any rational grounds. Or, to put it another way, my rationalism is not self-contained, but rests on an irrational faith in the attitude of reasonableness. I do not see that we can go beyond this. One could say, perhaps, that my irrational faith in equal and reciprocal rights to convince others and be convinced by them is a faith in human reason, or simply that I believe in man. So, he talks about how many have turned to irrationalism when they realize that rationalism can't be self-contained. And then he says, but such panic is entirely uncalled for. Although an uncritical and comprehensive rationalism is logically untenable, and although a comprehensive irrationalism is logically tenable, there is no reason why we should adopt the later. For there are other tenable attitudes, notably that of critical rationalism, which recognizes the fact that the fundamental rationalist attitude results from, at least tentatively, an act of faith, from faith in reason.

[00:12:54]  Bruce: Accordingly, our choice is open. We may choose some form of irrationalism, even some radical or comprehensive form. But we are also free to choose a critical form of rationalism, one which frankly admits its origin in an irrational decision, and which to an extent admits a certain priority of irrationalism.

[00:13:19]  Unidentified speaker: That's from page 437 of Open Society and Its Enemies.

[00:13:23]  Unidentified speaker: Sorry, go ahead.

[00:13:24]  Unidentified speaker: Why don't you make your comment?

[00:13:25]  Peter: Well, I guess one of the things related to these quotes, I think, that I would like to get out of this conversation that I have straight in my own mind, is this idea that people will bring up of applying critical rationalism to itself. I guess, I think that maybe that's the one of the, maybe at the core of what we're trying to wrestle with. It's something I've been kind of confused about, and I guess I can think of two ways to answer that. One is something like, well, you just have to have faith in it, kind of like you're saying, it's just the basic idea that there's some faith involved in the power of reason. And then the other way I can think of it is sort of the interwoven web of guesses thing. Well, you can't prove one assertion without other sorts of... It's thinking of it more as a web of ideas. That kind of makes some sense to me as well. But here's one quote that I had to look up from Popper, which is from that John Horgan article that we discussed before on the Dogmatism episode. I think it was our first one where they ask him... He asks him, is falsification falsifiable? And I guess you could say the same thing is fallibilism. Fallible is critical rationalism. Does critical rationalism apply to itself? And he says, do you remember this, Bruce?

[00:15:05]  Unidentified speaker: Yes, I do.

[00:15:05]  Unidentified speaker: He says, I don't want to hurt you.

[00:15:07]  Peter: He says gently, but it is a silly question.

[00:15:10]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:15:12]  Unidentified speaker: And then he says, and then he says, I'll just read the whole thing.

[00:15:18]  Peter: [Here/You're?] peering searchingly into my eyes. He asks if one of his critics urged me to pose the question. Yes, I lie.

[00:15:27]  Unidentified speaker: And he says, exactly, he says, looking pleased.

[00:15:30]  Peter: The first thing you do in a philosophy seminar, when somebody proposes an idea, is to say it doesn't satisfy its own criteria. It is one of the most idiotic criticisms one can imagine.

[00:15:46]  Peter: But then, I'm still not exactly sure why it's so idiotic.

[00:15:50]  Unidentified speaker: Well, keep reading.

[00:15:53]  Unidentified speaker: He actually explains it.

[00:15:54]  Peter: He says, his falsification concept, he says, helps distinguish between empirical and non-empirical modes of knowledge. Falsification itself is unempirical. It belongs not to science but to philosophy or meta-science. Popper asks if I understand his response.

[00:16:11]  Unidentified speaker: I nod.

[00:16:12]  Peter: He squeezes my hand, murmuring, yes, very good.

[00:16:17]  Bruce: So that response is definitely how Popper looked at it.

[00:16:22]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:16:23]  Bruce: I have criticized that response on this podcast. Let me, the episodes in question that I have in mind are episode 92, Popper on Philosophical Theories.

[00:16:35]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:16:35]  Bruce: And then episode 93, Philosophical Theories versus Bad Explanations. So, I honestly think that's the wrong answer, but it's not like this answer doesn't have some merit. So, let me try to explain his answer, but just understand that I don't necessarily agree with it, if that makes any sense. So, what he has in mind here is that you use falsification on empirical theories, and so, empirical theories can be falsified, and non-empirical theories, which he would say are metaphysical theories, can't be falsified.

[00:17:15]  Unidentified speaker: So, you use a different mode.

[00:17:16]  Bruce: You just use criticism at that point. And then in Chapter 8, which I criticize, he talks about, you can ask questions like, does it solve the problem, you know, as well as its competitors? And he goes through a set of what I called squishy criticisms that you use instead, okay?

[00:17:33]  Unidentified speaker: But that was the way Popper saw it.

[00:17:35]  Bruce: So he would have thought that critical rationalism being philosophy isn't trying to be falsifiable and that you have to criticize it without using experiments, basically, okay? So therefore, in his mind, you can't falsify it. He doesn't see that as a contradiction because he's never claimed it was a falsifiable empirical scientific theory to begin with. So there is no actual contradiction in his mind between these. So it doesn't make sense to ask the question, can critical rationalism itself be false? Can falsification itself be falsified, right? Instead, he's going to say, no, it's a conjecture.

[00:18:16]  Unidentified speaker: I'm conjecturing it.

[00:18:18]  Bruce: And is it fruitful or is it not? And then I criticize that in the podcast. I said, well, if we're going to do that, induction might be one of the most fruitful theories that there's ever been, right?

[00:18:29]  Unidentified speaker: In philosophy.

[00:18:30]  Bruce: So I've got some concerns with the way Popper's going about this, but I would agree that there's no actual contradiction here because there's no actual claim on Popper's part that critical rationalism is falsifiable.

[00:18:45]  Unidentified speaker: By the way, I disagree with that.

[00:18:46]  Bruce: I think critical rationalism is very much falsifiable, but that's just me. Maybe we can do a future podcast where I actually talk through the ways in which I think critical rationalism is falsifiable. So one of the big differences here for me is that I put forward the idea of testability versus checkability in episode 93, or whichever was the one on philosophical theories versus bad explanations. And what I was trying to show was that falsification doesn't just apply to empirical theories. Popper often acts as if that's the case, but even Popper gave a counter-example that I read with mathematical theories. Well, mathematical theories can be falsified because they're logic, right? And you can have falsification in the logical theory, because a theory can have logical content as well as empirical content and falsification can apply to logical content. The thing I pointed out though is that theories like critical rationalism have all sorts of logical content. Therefore, they can also be falsified just like a mathematical theory. Now, because of that, I think that means that Popper's demarcation criteria, the idea of a demarcation criteria, I think is correct. And I think Popper is even really close to having the right demarcation criteria. But it's not actually empirical versus non-empirical. It should have been having content that can be falsified, which might be logical content, not empirical content, versus not having such content. And that a true and metaphysical theory would be one that can't be falsified at all, has neither falsifiable content logically or empirically.

[00:20:31]  Bruce: Once you realize that, you realize that Popper really did sort of have the wrong demarcation line, because his theory belongs in the set of theories that can be falsified via logical content. I'm saying logical content, but it's actually a bigger bucket than that. It could be falsified by being at odds with another best theory. There's quite a number of things that I would consider to be objective criticisms that move you into the better camp, right? And so I will admit that critical rationalism is not an empirical theory.

[00:21:06]  Unidentified speaker: I've got no problem with that.

[00:21:07]  Bruce: And if you want to make a demarcation between empirical and non-empirical, that's fine. I just don't think that's the important demarcation line. I think that what we really want is we want a comparison between critical rationalism, which can be falsified logically, and something like, say, Misesian-Austrian economics, which he very proudly claimed was completely unfalsifiable.

[00:21:31]  Unidentified speaker: Like those are just two entirely different camps.

[00:21:33]  Bruce: That's where the demarcation line really should be because we're really talking about good explanations versus bad explanations. And a theory that's not empirical can be very good explanation. And a theory that, and we need some way to differentiate between bad explanations and philosophical explanations that are good explanations. And so I'm suggesting that falsifiability, which I then called checkability to not confuse it with Popper's use of falsifiability, where it's always empirical. I suggested that as really just being the right criteria. So I'm still using Popper's own criteria, but I'm suggesting that he drew it in the wrong spot if that makes any sense.

[00:22:14]  Peter: Okay, so metaphysical theories can be checkable, but not falsifiable.

[00:22:19]  Unidentified speaker: They can't.

[00:22:19]  Unidentified speaker: Some are, right?

[00:22:22]  Bruce: And I question whether we should even call them metaphysical theories, because that's just not what the term normally means. Like Popper's epistemology, I don't know most people would ever call it a metaphysical theory. I think only Popperians would call it a metaphysical theory, right? Typically, metaphysical theories are theories that you just can't check at all, right? They're assumptions that are built into, you know, your philosophy that in no way can be checked or challenged, and they don't say anything about the world that constrains it.

[00:22:53]  Unidentified speaker: All data will always fit it.

[00:22:55]  Bruce: That's really what I think a true metaphysical theory is for everyone but Popper, right? So anyhow, that's how I differ from Popper. I don't know how much, like, in a way, this is a big dissent from Popper on my part, but in a way, it's not because I'm literally using his own criteria to create a better line. So in some ways, I'm more true to his epistemology than he was, rather than less true to his epistemology, if that makes any sense. OK, so let me say these statements that I just read from Popper. When I first came across them, I got really excited. Being a Fideist myself, and we'll talk about whether I'm really a Fideist or not, because that term actually has multiple meanings. I was really glad to at last see someone willing to admit what to me had seemed obvious for a long time, that rationality and reason is rooted, at least for now, in faith. But having said that, I'm weird, I'm different, I have a religious background, so I wouldn't expect myself to be the typical rationalist. I could easily see why most rationalists would not like these statements from Popper, would really dislike these statements from Popper.

[00:24:17]  Unidentified speaker: And I really don't blame them.

[00:24:19]  Bruce: These are bold and uncomfortable statements that he is making. Okay, and I think we should just be honest that that's the case. Okay, now let's maybe talk about, given how uncomfortable these statements were, it's understandable that Bartley, they just did not set well with Bartley. Now I'm not that familiar with Bartley's views.

[00:24:40]  Unidentified speaker: Let me admit that up front.

[00:24:42]  Unidentified speaker: I haven't really had a chance to read Bartley.

[00:24:44]  Unidentified speaker: I think I would want to read Bartley.

[00:24:45]  Unidentified speaker: I think I would really like Bartley.

[00:24:48]  Bruce: So I'm going to explain Bartley's views, but understand that this is according to Agassi, right? So it may not be entirely accurate. Just as maybe we could challenge if Agassi has correctly understood Popper, we could challenge if Agassi really correctly understood Bartley. So I'm going to act as if this is just Bartley's views, but up front, I'm telling you, I'm only getting this from Agassi's paper, and I'm just sort of [blanking?], assuming Agassi is correct, which may not even be true.

[00:25:17]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:25:17]  Bruce: But we're trying to assess Agassi's paper, so it makes sense to at least on the face of it, assume he's right so that we can discuss his point of view. So, I can understand why Bartley found Popper's view disconcerting and set out to prove it was mistaken. So, Agassi says from the paper, page one, later on, Popper's disciple, William W. Bartley, dissented from him and even called him a fideist, much to his Popper's annoyance. All this caused bad blood between the two, which is most regrettable. It is understandable, though, as the matter is very complicated.

[00:25:55]  Unidentified speaker: Let me show this now.

[00:25:57]  Bruce: So, the paper is going to be trying to show that this is a complicated matter, and so it's understandable that there was a bit of a blow up between them.

[00:26:05]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:26:06]  Bruce: He says that by trying to solve this, he's hoping to settle the ghosts of Bartley and Popper, which I thought was kind of cute. So, Agassi then sets out to explain both men's viewpoints, what each of them got right and what he thinks each of them got wrong. Agassi ultimately descends from both of them.

[00:26:23]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:26:24]  Bruce: And what he feels the correct answer is. Note that Agassi did not see the blow up as being about the demarcation criteria, as Wikipedia claimed, but over Bartley's implicitly calling Popper a Fideist. So apparently, if we accept Agassi's view here, I guess I do accept Agassi's view here, Popper apparently did not see himself as a Fideist, like I do, and reacted badly to having that label applied to him. Having said that, there may have been more than one thing that they blew up over, so I'm not necessarily saying Wikipedia is wrong. But Agassi was there, so I do maybe give some priority over Agassi's view here that he probably does know what he's talking about. Now, in the previous episode, or at least the previous episode that we recorded, I don't know if we'll release him in the same order or not, I called myself a Fideist.

[00:27:18]  Unidentified speaker: What is a Fideist?

[00:27:20]  Bruce: So Google gives the following, if you Google it, Fideism is a view of religious belief that holds that faith must be held without the use of reason or even against reason. Faith does not need reason, faith creates its own justification. I can at least somewhat relate to that definition, and that's why I consider myself a Fideist.

[00:27:41]  Peter: Well, from that definition, practically all religious people would be Fideists, right?

[00:27:47]  Unidentified speaker: So, not necessarily.

[00:27:50]  Bruce: Some religious people think that they've arrived at their beliefs through rationalism.

[00:27:55]  Unidentified speaker: Fair enough.

[00:27:56]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:27:59]  Bruce: And I don't know if religious people would in general think highly of Fideists. And one of the things that I should probably just admit up front here, Fideists aren't really well thought of. So me coming out as a Fideist is not an easy thing for me to do. It's got these epistemological implications, which is what Agassi is going to discuss in his paper, that aren't considered very good by most rationalists, that most rationalists really buck against. So being a Fideist is not going to be popular amongst rationalists. I don't think it's going to be popular amongst religious people either, because I think it maybe feels a little bit too much like an agnostic, right? And so I think that it's not necessarily a popular view with anybody, and I'm not even sure my form of fideism would be particularly popular with other fideists, because as we'll see, a lot of them believe some kind of crazy things that I just couldn't relate to. And my version of fideism, as we'll see as we go through Agassi's paper, would probably be a little offensive to many fideists. Now, with that having been said, let me just say this. When I decided to label myself a fideist, you have to see me as the guy who hates philosophy, right? Other than philosophy of science, I've got little interest or use for philosophy. So I'm not approaching this having read a bunch of fideists and then said, yeah, that's my theory, right? I'm a guy who read a definition on Google and said, approximately, and I'll go ahead and allow that label. And there's not a much more deeper going on here with me.

[00:29:41]  Bruce: And this is important to realize because I'm sure actual real life fideists held all sorts of views that go well beyond that simple definition. And in fact, they were making, as we will see from Agassi's paper, they were making some fairly deep epistemological claims, which maybe are somewhat questionable. Okay, so because of this, I don't know if I would, I'm a certain kind of fideist, but I'm not necessarily claiming the overall philosophy at all, or any of their writings or anything to do with any other fideist, if that makes any sense. Nevertheless, I am comfortable with it as an approximate label for me. So using this backdrop of the blow up between Popper and Bartley, one of the things I'm going to discuss is, was Popper a fideist, as Bartley accused him?

[00:30:34]  Unidentified speaker: And why am I a fideist?

[00:30:36]  Unidentified speaker: Why do I relate to that label, if you will?

[00:30:39]  Bruce: So Agassi then explains fideism. He says, page one, fideism is a minimal retreat from classical rationalism. Now classical rationalism, he's going to use that term all throughout the paper, it's summarized as rationality equals proof. Okay, so it's justificationist version of rationalism that predates Popper. So how could such rationalism ever first prove itself correct?

[00:31:04]  Unidentified speaker: Now the answer is, it couldn't.

[00:31:07]  Bruce: So if it can't, then why should you accept rationalism in the first place? So then on page one, Agassi says, To that end, adherents to fideism advocate some axioms taken on faith as the minimum necessary concession to irrationalism. Okay, so so far, this sounds suspiciously close to what we just read from Popper. So why would Popper reject being a fideist when so far at least, this sounds like exactly precisely what we just read Popper say.

[00:31:38]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:31:38]  Peter: It almost sounds like he just doesn't like the word or something.

[00:31:41]  Unidentified speaker: It just has implications.

[00:31:42]  Bruce: He finds [offense/offensive?] where we're going to find that's kind of what it is.

[00:31:47]  Unidentified speaker: It's a little more than that.

[00:31:48]  Bruce: It's because the word might mean some things that really are just wrong in a lot of cases.

[00:31:55]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:31:56]  Bruce: So Agassi explains why Popper may not have seen himself as a fideist. It's because apparently fideists took the stance that any set of starting equi-

[00:32:06]  Unidentified speaker: axioms was equally good.

[00:32:08]  Bruce: And this was certainly not Popper's view.

[00:32:10]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:32:11]  Unidentified speaker: It's not my view either, by the way.

[00:32:13]  Bruce: So if that's what fideism means, then I'm not a fideist either. Moreover, Popper wasn't a classical rationalist anyhow. He was a critical rationalist, which is rooted in rationality equating to a critical attitude rather than to proofs. Does this tweak on rationalism somehow undo the need for fideism? So Agassi admits that this is a more difficult question than it first appears. So, spoiler, at least my interpretation of Agassi is that he ultimately comes down on the side of, yes, we don't need faith and reason if we understand reason as a critical attitude.

[00:32:48]  Unidentified speaker: Or at least that's my interpretation.

[00:32:49]  Bruce: Like, he really kind of says both, and so it's a little hard to tell what he intended. But trying to explain why this is the case, he takes 26 pages in a frankly difficult to follow argument. Moreover, Agassi is convinced that Bartley's approach to getting to this answer is just wrong. But first, before we get into that, let's try to understand Bartley's argument, or at least Agassi's interpretation of Bartley's argument. So, Bartley's argument, at a minimum, critical rationalism seems to not have the fatal flaw that classical rationalism has. Since classical rationalism demands proof, therefore demands proof of itself, critical rationalism does not demand proof of anything.

[00:33:36]  Unidentified speaker: So, it does not demand proof of itself.

[00:33:39]  Bruce: This is the key insight that Bartley tried to utilize to show Popper was wrong, and that critical rationalism is, in fact, comprehensive, and in that it lived up to its own standards. So Bartley, in Theories of Rationality, page 205 from the collection Evolutionary Epistemology, Rationality, and the Sociology of Knowledge, by the way that is the same collection of Donald Campbell's papers that I've referred to a number of times. He says, My theory attempts to build on, to interpret, to correct, and to generalize Popper's theory of falsifiability. I have a different, at different times, named my account Comprehensively Critical Rationalism and Pan-Critical Rationalism. And the abbreviations CCR and PCR are often used in the literature to refer to it.

[00:34:30]  Unidentified speaker: That was page 205.

[00:34:31]  Bruce: Bartley's view was to attack the claim that there could be anything not open to criticism, including the claim that everything is open to criticism. Now, by doing this, he wanted to make critical rationalism, quote, comprehensive, in that it was self-justified on its own standards. So, oh wait, of course, you can't justify anything in critical rationalism, right?

[00:34:57]  Unidentified speaker: Ah, but you can.

[00:34:59]  Bruce: Recall that critical rationalism simply shifts what we justify. Instead of justifying a theory as correct, we justify a preference for a theory as better than the current alternatives. So, under critical rationalism, Bartley had a much lower standard than classical rationalism. Classical rationalism had to prove itself true. Critical rationalism merely means to show there aren't currently, there is no current better alternative than the theory that you're suggesting. If Bartley could just show that, then, so Bartley argued, critical rationalism would self-justify on its own standards and would thus be comprehensive. Contrary to Popper's claim that it was not comprehensive, recall from the quotes, he explicitly says critical rationalism is not, rationalism is not comprehensive, and he doesn't see how it ever could be. I think the main mistake that Bartley seems to have made was that he seems to have believed that he just needed to show it was possible to criticize the view that everything is open to criticism. If you see this from Bartley's perspective, I do think this makes a perverse sort of sense. If the problem is that a Fideist, like Popper, in Bartley's mind, is claiming that there is a set of rational principles that must be adopted uncritically, then showing that you can criticize those principles would have necessity disprove the Fideist position. However, given that we just barely read Popper's quotes, do you recall anywhere at all where he claimed there was a set of specific rational principles that you must adopt uncritically? Like it just isn't there, okay?

[00:36:47]  Unidentified speaker: So herein lies the problem.

[00:36:49]  Bruce: Bartley was, in fact, strawmanning Popper's position, at least to a degree. Moreover, at least according to Agassi, Bartley's solution simply didn't really address the true underlying problem. So let's go over Agassi's view of both men's positions. So, not surprisingly, Agassi sees both men as [an heir?]. He thinks Popper is wrong that we need to have faith and reason under the lower standards of critical rationalism, although he's going to spend 26 pages explaining why that is because it's not an easy thing to explain.

[00:37:21]  Unidentified speaker: This is a quote from Agassi.

[00:37:22]  Bruce: Bartley acutely observed that when Popper said that his proposal to take the faith [in/and?] reason is a deviation from rationalism, he Popper was in error, or at the very least, the deviation is from classical, not from critical rationalism.

[00:37:40]  Unidentified speaker: That's from page four.

[00:37:42]  Bruce: On page three, he says, Popper has proposed two brilliant minimizing moves of the standard of rationality, of the standard of rationality and of the concession to irrationalism. Bartley has shown that there is no need for the two moves.

[00:37:58]  Unidentified speaker: One will do.

[00:37:59]  Bruce: And what Agassi is getting at here is that you don't need the faith, you just need the lower standards of critical rationalism. This is why I read Agassi's paper as ultimately disagreeing with Popper.

[00:38:11]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:38:12]  Bruce: Here, Agassi means that Popper argued for, essentially from a Fideist point of view, two starting axioms, accept reason on faith and accept reason as a critical attitude, not proof. But Agassi is, if I'm reading him correctly, I just gave you the quote, so decide for yourself. He is saying that Bartley was correct, that actually you only need one starting axiom, accept reason is a critical attitude. So far, Agassi seems to be agreeing with Bartley against Popper. But Agassi also thinks Bartley's proposal for how to solve the problem doesn't work. So page three, it's a shame that Popper had not admitted that we don't need faith and reason to justify critical rationalism.

[00:38:55]  Unidentified speaker: That's me inserting something so it makes more sense, the quote in context.

[00:39:00]  Bruce: Suggesting instead that Bartley just improved the wording of what he, Popper, had intended to advocate all along. He, Popper, denied that he made the mistake that Bartley had attributed to him. It is likewise a shame that Bartley conflated his valid criticism of Popper with his, Bartley's, own alternative to it. Only the criticism, not the alternative theory to the criticized theory, is uncontestable. The errors on both sides led to an impasse. In desperation, Bartley called Popper a Fideist, and Popper took offense. My aim here is to rectify these two errors and thus restore the peace between their ghosts. So what is Agassi's solution?

[00:39:45]  Unidentified speaker: Now we spend 26 pages.

[00:39:46]  Bruce: I'm going to try my best to explain what I think Agassi's solution is. There's one aspect to it that I'm honestly not sure what he intended. And because of that, there may be other places where I'm misinterpreting him. So this is one of those cases where I'm going to give my best analysis as a layman, interested layman doing my best to make sense of this. I highly recommend you go read the paper for yourself and form your own opinion.

[00:40:12]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[00:40:12]  Bruce: I will give the quotes and I will try to show why I think this is the right way to understand Agassi's argument. So what is Agassi's third way solution between these two warring giants?

[00:40:24]  Unidentified speaker: Unfortunately, Agassi's argument, as I just said, is a bit difficult to make sense of.

[00:40:28]  Unidentified speaker: I'm going to do my best here.

[00:40:30]  Bruce: Agassi is a clever writer, but he writes in a roundabout way rather than coming out and explaining himself directly. But here is a summary of Agassi's view in his own words. He says on page four, my alternative to the framework is the idea that rationalism is a working hypothesis. Thus, it is neither a basis for rational thought nor an object of faith, but simply an assumption that facilitates rational deliberations.

[00:40:56]  Unidentified speaker: Now this may sound perfectly clear.

[00:40:58]  Bruce: In fact, when I read that paragraph, I thought for sure I now understood what Agassi's view was. Then I finished reading the paper and I was a lot less clear.

[00:41:10]  Unidentified speaker: I understood what this statement actually meant.

[00:41:12]  Bruce: And I will discuss the problem being the term working hypothesis. I will get into why that's a problem as we go along. So let me explain what I thought he originally meant. I thought Agassi was arguing that the theory that we should use reason and be rational was a critical rationalist best theory of sorts. It is perfectly open to criticism and it isn't assumed to be a correct, but there isn't a good competing alternative available, so we adopt it for now. If this was true, then Bartley is correct that critical rationalism self-justifies as a preference for as the preference for reason and rationality without needing an uncritical axiom such as faith as a starting point. But a careful read of Agassi suggests he isn't quite that isn't quite what he is arguing, which is good because I'm going to argue that that would have been an incorrect point of view. So reason can't qualify as a best theory under critical rationalism is what I'm going to argue. And therefore I'm going to argue that Bartley was actually wrong about that. Is this then what Agassi was arguing? The first part comes very close to being how I read his paper. He first points out that classical rationalism, rationality is proof, was hopeless on its own terms.

[00:42:37]  Unidentified speaker: You can't prove anything really.

[00:42:39]  Bruce: So, of course, you can't prove classical rationalism either, thereby making it on its own terms irrational. But Agassi argues Popper changed that to critical rationalism, that is, rationality is disproof, and argues that this adjusts the standard to something more reasonable. So page 18 he says, Agassi says, Popper offers a solution to the problem of rationality, not a logical truth but a conjecture, the novel theory that disproof suffices for the advancement of knowledge in general and of science in particular. How does he know this disproof suffices?

[00:43:18]  Unidentified speaker: He does not.

[00:43:19]  Unidentified speaker: It is his conjecture.

[00:43:22]  Bruce: This is important since critical rationalism doesn't believe in justification via proofs. There is no need for it to prove that disproofs are sufficient to be rational. Indeed, it merely needs to conjecture that they are. Still, Agassi claims, though, that this is actually a difficult question.

[00:43:44]  Unidentified speaker: And as we'll see, this is correct.

[00:43:45]  Unidentified speaker: It is a difficult question.

[00:43:48]  Bruce: Agassi then shows that it isn't really possible to take a full irrational stance, that even the Fideists do not, Fideists do not take a full rational stance. So, page eight, the advantage of unreason, however, is that it is licensed for the use of poor arguments.

[00:44:07]  Unidentified speaker: I thought that was funny, the way he put that.

[00:44:09]  Bruce: But Agassi points out that rationalists do advocate for using their intellect and even rationalism in many cases. They merely don't see it as authoritative. So this is an important point, and I'm really glad Agassi gets it, because it's really common for rationalists to say something like, well, if irrationalism works, go try to live your life irrationally. Let's see how well it goes for you. That's a misunderstanding, because a Fideist isn't claiming that they're going to live their life irrationally. They're claiming it's not authoritative to live your life rationally.

[00:44:47]  Unidentified speaker: It's a totally different claim.

[00:44:51]  Bruce: Okay, so given a Fideist's view, there's nothing inconsistent about this. So I can appreciate that Agassi brings this point up. And as I said, I've often seen people try to argue this and it's the wrong argument. But irrationalism is not a claim that we should never use reason. It's just that it isn't authoritative, or at least a Fideism is, depending on whether you see Fideism as a form of rationalism or not. So it's strange, it isn't strange at all that an irrationalist, if they're a Fideist, may choose to be rational when doing, say, logic or math. But then why bother claiming irrationality at all? So page 8, he says, the irrationalist literature has many answers to this questions that serve as mere working hypotheses. Notice that he refers to it as working hypothesis, which is what he sees critical rationalism as.

[00:45:41]  Unidentified speaker: So he's making a circle here.

[00:45:45]  Bruce: More on working hypotheses later, but this choice of words is no accident, because Agassi is claiming rationality is a working hypothesis too. So on page 9, he says, indeed, they may add, one may endorse quite arbitrarily any presupposition as the initial basic axiom for rationality. So Agassi points out that this seems to suggest that a Fideist would be open to the utter arbitrariness, absent of logic, of the choice of initial basic axioms.

[00:46:17]  Unidentified speaker: That's an actual quote from him.

[00:46:19]  Bruce: But in reality, there's only a small set of alternative options that tend to be available. Typically, either, he says, induction or traditions of our fathers are often proposed. So Agassi argues that apparently even Fideists don't accept that extreme idea that the starting axioms are utterly arbitrary. Or, put another way, even if Fideists are right that rationalism can't self-justify and thus must be accepted on faith, it wouldn't save the most extreme and arguably the most true forms of Fideism, where the initial starting axioms are entirely arbitrary. It is even arguably, Agassi argues, a bit self-undermining, page 14, especially since finding any rationale to the Fideist's initial basic axiom deprives it of its arbitrariness and so of its very Fideism, so it's self-undermining. Moreover, Fideists would technically be open to changing their starting axioms, if the current ones don't work as well as some others. So, Agassi says, page 13, even if Fideism is true and an arbitrary choice of some initial axiom is required, it need not be final. But if this is true, then you can't really say the Fideist leap of faith was total or complete or not subject to criticism or revision on rational grounds. So based on these arguments, Agassi has shown a giant problem with Fideism or at least how it is often interpreted. Maybe we should say a giant problem with the purest forms of Fideism. We'll see later that Agassi admits this doesn't necessarily entirely refute Fideism, which is good because it doesn't. But it does refute many popular interpretations of Fideism.

[00:48:09]  Bruce: The next step in Agassi's argument is to ask if critical rationalism is really open to self-criticism. So on page 19 he says, Assume that we must choose some initial basic axiom.

[00:48:20]  Unidentified speaker: How can the choice be rational?

[00:48:22]  Bruce: Given Popper's theory of rationality as openness to criticism, the answer to this question is obvious.

[00:48:27]  Unidentified speaker: To the extent that it is criticizable and open to criticism, it is.

[00:48:32]  Bruce: Does this apply to Popper's own choice? Should a critical rationalist be open-minded about being open-minded?

[00:48:39]  Unidentified speaker: This is hard to say, he says.

[00:48:42]  Bruce: So Agassi admits that he's not sure.

[00:48:44]  Unidentified speaker: This is hard to say, he says.

[00:48:47]  Bruce: However, consider the case of logic. This is where Agassi kind of goes from here. Everyone, both past and present philosophers, ultimately took adherence to logic for granted. Even if they asked if logic was really binding or not. Now, this may seem circular question begging at first, but Agassi points out that actually the first philosophers had no idea what logic really even was. Like in Plato's day, formal logic just didn't really exist yet, right? Or put another way, even while all philosophers adhered to logic, through all history adhered to logic without question, well, I mean, they did question it, but they still adhered to it, even if they asked the question, should we adhere to it?

[00:49:33]  Unidentified speaker: They always did.

[00:49:35]  Bruce: They actually were at the same time criticizing and improving what they even meant by logic in the first place. So you can't really claim they were taking formal logic as their starting axiom, and then were not allowing it to be criticized.

[00:49:51]  Unidentified speaker: Does that make sense?

[00:49:51]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, this is like a really interesting insight that Agassi's come up with here.

[00:49:57]  Bruce: So, page 20, he says, So logic was open to criticism.

[00:50:01]  Unidentified speaker: Is it still?

[00:50:02]  Bruce: If yes, can its authority be revoked? In other words, can there be a critical debate on the rationality of logic?

[00:50:10]  Unidentified speaker: And if it is found defective, can it be taken for granted?

[00:50:13]  Bruce: This depends on what we mean by the demand to reject a refuted version of it. If it is the demand to improve logic, then yes, we can reject it. If it is the demand to jettison it, then no. Hence, in the broad sense, logic is not given to rational deliberations, and so it is an initial axiom of rationality. Yet in the narrow sense, logic is very much given to rational deliberations, and thus is expressed in the perennial effort to improve it. And this is expressed in the perennial effort to improve it.

[00:50:51]  Unidentified speaker: That's page 20.

[00:50:53]  Bruce: And then he says, also page 20, This holds for all possible versions of the Theory of Rationality, since discussion of it, rationality, was always conducted with logic. And then, Popper's claim that rationality is not comprehensive can be seen not as a concession to Fideism, but as making explicit a point that was traditionally taken for granted, and that the modern history of logic makes its explicit statement desirable. The broad commitment to logic invites efforts [to/as?] its improvement in details. Okay, let's take an aside on Fideism here for a moment, now that we've kind of got the broad brush strokes of Agassi's arguments. So now we see Popper's claim that faith is based on reason can possibly be recast only as a broad commitment to reason, not as a set of axioms that we aren't allowed to criticize. If this is what Popper meant, and I would argue that is what Popper meant, is Popper then a Fideist? It seems that the answer is, it depends on what you mean by Fideist, apparently. So page 3 from Agassi's paper. Now the Fideism that Bartley has saddled Popper with, is at the very least not the traditional version, but an improvement on it. It says, welcome critical scrutiny [as a progressive?]. If this is a version of Fideism, then it is an admirable version of it. But Popper and Bartley have confused this idea, be it a version of Fideism or not, with a slightly greater demand. Do not advocate a theory unless it has passed critical scrutiny. This version of rationalism, be it Fideist or not, both Popper and Bartley rejected, and rightly so.

[00:52:46]  Bruce: Despite its superiority over the more traditional versions of Fideism.

[00:52:51]  Peter: Tell me if you think I'm wrong, but it seems to me this whole thing plays right into my idea that critical rationalism is more of an attitude towards life than anything else. It's an attitude that says I might be wrong and you might be right, but together by effort, we get closer to truth.

[00:53:13]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, that's an attitude.

[00:53:15]  Bruce: I think that's exactly what Popper is saying, right? The fact that he's saying it's faith-based, he's saying, I think you should adopt that attitude, and I have no proof that you should, and maybe you shouldn't, but I'm advocating for you doing it based on faith that this is worth trying, this is worth doing and that it's going to be positive.

[00:53:35]  Peter: Well, faith is such a loaded term though, too. I mean, how do you prove any attitude?

[00:53:42]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[00:53:43]  Bruce: If we understand Fideism as meaning there is an uncritical commitment to certain precise starting axioms, I agree that neither Popper nor I are Fideists. But if we understand it as more of a broad commitment to reason that can't itself be shown to be a best theory, i.e. a theory with no unrefuted competitors, then I think I am a Fideist and I think so is Popper. For what it is worth, apparently, Agassi doesn't count this as a real Fideist and declares Popper therefore not a real Fideist and would probably declare me not a real Fideist. However, Agassi argues this may possibly save a form of Fideism, the kind I'm advocating for. On page 20, he says, once this is noted, the discussion of comprehensiveness has to be recast in a more precise manner. For example, the advocates of Fideism's commitment to their tradition is less irrational if it's only a broad commitment, while being open-minded about any detail of it. This is no small difference as it replaces the refusal to engage in intellectual traffic between different traditions with a proposal to have it at least up to a point, but the point is movable. Now, I think that's really great, what he just said. I think that this actually explains exactly what I have in mind when I'm thinking of myself as a Fideist or what I'm thinking of myself as a religionist.

[00:55:16]  Bruce: I think there just really isn't a problem with a broad commitment to religion as long as you're open to criticizing the specific details of it and being willing to move the point as to what is allowed to have the point be movable as to how far you will go in the discussion with traffic with other ideas. So this actually is a really good explanation of my complete lack of seeing a problem with being a religionist and being a rationalist at the same time, which I know most people do have a problem with that, right? But I think Agassi's quote here really explains why I just don't see it as a problem. So now let's talk about Agassi's view on faith, okay? If we are accepting a broad commitment to reason, though not any specific understanding of reason, does this show Popper's claim that reason is based on faith is wrong?

[00:56:15]  Unidentified speaker: So here's what Agassi argues.

[00:56:17]  Bruce: He says, page 21, suppose that the thesis that criticism suffices for progress is refuted. What will this suggest to critical rationalists? Again, it seems it will invite an improvement, not a total overthrow. So Agassi does not see a broad commitment to reason as the same as accepting reason on faith irrationally as Popper claimed, or at least that's how I read that passage. Maybe Peter, you read it differently than me. Again, I'm tempted here to reason that Agassi is claiming best theory status for a broad commitment to reason, and therefore no faith is required because it self-justifies on its own standards. And if so, I feel like he's going about justifying it, quote-unquote, justifying it, in a way inconsistent with critical rationalism. However, Agassi makes it fairly clear that this isn't what he's claiming. And let me read the actual quotes. In fact, Agassi never once in this paper claims a broad commitment to reason is, in fact, a best theory without competitors. Instead, he calls it a working hypothesis.

[00:57:24]  Unidentified speaker: Now, here's the thing.

[00:57:26]  Bruce: The term working hypothesis might just be a synonym for best current theory. I mean, isn't that the way we would talk about, say, general relativity? We would say, well, you know, general relativity, it's false. We know it's false, but it's our current best working hypothesis. And here we're using the word working hypothesis to really mean best current theory, and it has no good alternative competitors. So if it's tempting to read Agassi as meaning by working hypothesis, best current theory. Granted, the term best current theory probably is more Deutschian critical rationalism, and we wouldn't expect Agassi to use those specific words.

[00:58:06]  Unidentified speaker: But I don't even see the concept in his paper, right?

[00:58:09]  Unidentified speaker: At least not stated clearly.

[00:58:11]  Bruce: There's some places where he maybe hints at it, but he never states it clearly. And as we've seen at times, he does talk at times as if working hypothesis means best current theory.

[00:58:23]  Unidentified speaker: But he makes a particularly clear statement that this isn't his intent.

[00:58:26]  Bruce: So page five, he says, What characterizes a working hypothesis most is its fluidity. There is no commitment and hardly any reason to it. Its adoption is for a lark. One may even take it on a whim, though on occasion it is common sense. It was noticing this paragraph that made me realize that Agassi never actually comes out and claims best theory status for critical rationalism. He is only claiming it as a working hypothesis that we're exploring. Now to be sure, he then goes on to use the example of Jews during World War II refusing to save Jews in Europe because, quote, nothing they would do would make a difference. And he points out that this theory seems inherently inferior to the theory we can in fact sometimes make a difference. And again, it seems to me when he uses arguments like this that he's tacitly claiming that his working hypothesis is actually a best theory that has no current better competitors. So honestly, this is why I'm a bit unclear what which he intends here, and I'm even tempted to claim he wants to have it both ways. So let's assume for the sake of argument that Agassi is not claiming best theory status for critical rationalism. But doesn't that then mean that Popper was right after all? We did choose reason and rationality as our working hypothesis based on a whim or hardly any reason to it, to quote Agassi here. Or as Popper put it, we chose reason on faith.

[01:00:01]  Bruce: So if reason and rationality really are just a working hypothesis but not a claim to best current theory status, then I admit I do not see the difference between Popper's claim that reason is based on faith and Agassi's claim that it is a working hypothesis.

[01:00:17]  Unidentified speaker: Those two seem the same to me.

[01:00:21]  Bruce: But what if we assume Agassi is claiming his working hypothesis is in fact a best theory, meaning it has no real competitors that haven't been refuted or at least strongly criticized? Okay, that is what I'm going to consider next. Okay, this is going to take a bit more to kind of walk through. And this is my biggest side where I'm going to try to explain my opinion on this subject.

[01:00:44]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:00:46]  Bruce: However, before I do that, go on to criticize this view, let me admit that Agassi has made some real progress here. I found the way he put this as a broad commitment to reason, but not to any specific axioms. That's a really helpful clarifying thing that he has brought up in this paper.

[01:01:04]  Unidentified speaker: And I think that's marvellous, okay?

[01:01:06]  Bruce: I certainly hadn't thought of it that way before reading his paper. I'm now working that idea into my own thought processes. So Popper surely didn't make it clear, he's only talking about a broad commitment to reason, not any specific set of axioms. This does make the faith in reason seem, if this is what Popper actually means, and I do think it is what he means, it does make the faith in reason seem a heck of a lot more reasonable, as it were. And maybe this is Agassi's point. If we've chosen to follow a broad commitment to reason as our working hypothesis, even if it was based on what Popper calls faith, it is a benign form of faith compared to what Bartley was claiming Popper was advocating for.

[01:01:51]  Unidentified speaker: That's at least a possible way you could read Agassi.

[01:01:55]  Bruce: In fact, Agassi, somewhat surprisingly, points out a form of Fideism itself can be saved in this way.

[01:02:04]  Unidentified speaker: Recall, I already used this quote.

[01:02:06]  Bruce: Recall, he said, the broad commitment to logic invites efforts at its improvement in detail. But this is how the passage continued. Once this is noted, the discussion of comprehensiveness has to be recast in a more precise manner. For example, the advocates of Fideism's commitment to their tradition is less irrational if it is only a broad commitment, while being open minded about any detail of it. Okay, so let's summarize best we can Agassi's argument briefly. Bartley was correct that Popper was wrong to argue that we need to start with faith and reason as an irrational starting point.

[01:02:46]  Unidentified speaker: Or maybe that's not quite right.

[01:02:47]  Bruce: Maybe Agassi is instead saying, yes, Popper was correct that faith and reason is a necessary starting point, but only as a broad commitment, not as a specific set of axioms. I'm still unclear which of those he actually says.

[01:02:59]  Unidentified speaker: He kind of says both.

[01:03:01]  Bruce: But Bartley's proposal for how to solve this problem, Agassi claims was itself incorrect. Instead, we should, according to Agassi, understand rationalism as a hyperstable working hypothesis. Agassi also argues that rationality is somewhat similar to logic, where you can talk all you want about how maybe logic isn't a correct hypothesis, but ultimately there really isn't an alternative available other than formal logic. Therefore, I mean, there are other forms of logic that have been suggested, but I think it's probably safe to say that they really haven't been competitive with regular, deductive logic, that propositional logic or first-order logic that is the more common versions of logic. Therefore, Agassi admits that at a broad level, yes, we are not open to jettisoning rationality. It is unclear if Agassi is saying this because there are no alternatives or if we are simply committed to it on faith. But on any specific view of rationality, it is open to revision and improvement. So now let me go into my view and my criticism of trying to read Agassi as claiming that critical rationalism has best theory status. So I think Agassi's argument is better than Bartley's for sure. I think it is very insightful to point out that logic has no real alternatives and we continually improved it for centuries and may yet improve it again. He is also correct that logic is hooked at the hip with rationality. So on page 20 he says, This holds for all possible versions of the theory of rationality, since, to repeat, discussion of it was always conducted with logic.

[01:04:56]  Bruce: And I think I agree with him that if Popper was a Fideist, he's my kind of benign Fideist that has only a faith-based broad commitment to reason, rather than a specific set of unchallengeable axioms. But I feel like Agassi failed to answer the real question. Do we accept, at least as of today, reason on faith? Indeed, it's unclear if his working hypothesis was a claim to Beth's theory status or not. He sometimes says, seems to me to say yes and he sometimes seems to me to say no.

[01:05:33]  Unidentified speaker: So here's my answer.

[01:05:35]  Bruce: Yes, all rationalists, at least as of today, accept a broad commitment to rationalism based on faith.

[01:05:42]  Unidentified speaker: That is my conjecture.

[01:05:44]  Bruce: I have now stated it far more clearly than Agassi did, and thus it will be easier to criticize.

[01:05:49]  Unidentified speaker: This is how it should be.

[01:05:51]  Bruce: The choice to stay what you mean clearly to make criticism easy is what critical rationalism is all about. So why do I believe a commitment to rationalism is ultimately based on faith? Let me make my argument to you before you judge my conjecture. To see why this is, let me use a thought experiment inspired by my real life, that I once offered to a crit-rat friend to help him understand why I felt Popper's argument that reason is based on faith was actually correct.

[01:06:22]  Unidentified speaker: He wasn't sure he agreed.

[01:06:24]  Bruce: Now, many of you know, because I've said it on this podcast, that my sister is dying of cancer. When I first heard this, it threw me into a very deep depression that lasted for maybe a year. I've lost loved ones before, my grandparents, but I've never lost someone younger than me before. So the situation was a shock to me, and I had troubles learning to deal with it. I had a thought cross my mind during this period.

[01:06:55]  Unidentified speaker: This is maybe not the best thought, but it did come to my mind.

[01:06:59]  Bruce: Would it ever make sense to say, try to talk my Christian dying sister into believing there is no afterlife? Now to be sure, let me be clear, I'm not an atheist. I'm a religious myself, and I'm quite open to the possibility of an afterlife. Although I'm also quite open to the possibility that it will be a Tiplerian, Deutschian-style, Omega Point-style afterlife. So I personally would never be someone who would argue to that, to her anyhow, because that's not what I believe. But the thought occurred to me, what if I was an atheist rationalist? What if I sincerely thought that part of the rational worldview is that there is no afterlife, and that is a rational principle that a rational person will come to accept? In other words, what if I was a hardcore, dyed-in-the-wool, atheist rationalist, and I didn't believe in an afterlife, as most atheist rationalists do not believe in afterlife. So this isn't so weird, right? The weird thing would be an atheist rationalist that does believe in an afterlife. They do exist, but they're pretty rare. It seems to me that it would be stupid and immoral for me to try to convince a dying loved one on their deathbed that death is the end and there is no afterlife, if they currently believed in an afterlife. So, talking with this crit-rat friend, we were discussing whether or not critical rationalism was ultimately based on faith or not. Do we agree with Popper or do we not agree with Popper? And I was trying to explain why I felt Popper was correct that faith was required as a starting point for reason.

[01:08:41]  Bruce: So, I told him I wanted to offer him a thought experiment based on what was happening with me, with my sister. I asked him if it would ever make sense for me to try to talk to my dying Christian sister, talk my dying Christian sister into believing in a lack of afterlife given her circumstance, even if that were true. And he said to me, you are clearly asking the wrong question. The correct rational question is, how should you relate to your dying sister? And who knows, maybe there will come a situation where you can talk to her about the lack of an afterlife. Now, this response is interesting for a few reasons. First, this guy knew I wasn't an atheist. So he should have been obvious this was just a hypothetical question. And I thought I had made it clear that this was just a hypothetical question that I was using as a way to try to explain to him my viewpoint, that I was not actually asking him for advice on how to interact with my sister. I was trying to simply use a thought experiment to help explain my answer to why I felt Popper was correct that reason is based on faith. It just didn't make sense for him to pretend that I was instead asking him for advice on how to interact with my dying sister.

[01:09:57]  Unidentified speaker: So I thought, well, maybe I wasn't clear.

[01:09:58]  Bruce: Maybe he actually thinks I am asking him for advice on how to interact with my dying sister. So I clarified and I wrote back to him. And I made it very, very clear that I was not asking for advice on how to interact with my dying sister. I was using a real life personal scenario that was on my mind because it's impacting me today. To help him understand through a thought experiment, why I thought Popper was probably correct. And if he was willing to actually give the thought experiment a thoughtful answer to my question instead of just changing the subject and talking about how I should interact with my sister, that he would see that it would help him see where I was coming from and that it was maybe even a valid criticism of what he was suggesting. So at this point, the CritRat friend wrote back to me and he repeated to me again that I was asking the wrong question and that instead the real question was how to interact with my sister. So I realized at this point that he was not going to give me an answer to this question. And not even as a hypothetical to allow me to help explain my viewpoint and to tacitly allow a criticism of his view. So I let the subject drop. So please note that my sister listens to this podcast, so technically I just had this conversation with her. And she's probably going to bring it up to me and talk with me about it.

[01:11:23]  Peter: Maybe I'm not completely getting your issue with his response.

[01:11:29]  Unidentified speaker: This is a good response, right?

[01:11:30]  Peter: I mean, I guess my thought when you posed this was kind of similar, in that if your sister or in any similar situation, if someone is open and wants to know about your views and is open to talking about your ideas with you, you should do that. But you shouldn't just go around trying to convince people of things, whether it's an afterlife or not, or particularly if it's going to be potentially emotionally damaging to them.

[01:12:16]  Bruce: So, I think you just said, so you're right, that's exactly the right answer, Peter. So let me note that if I had been asking for advice how to interact with my sister, his answer was entirely spot on in every conceivable way.

[01:12:35]  Unidentified speaker: Fair enough.

[01:12:36]  Unidentified speaker: This isn't a small point, okay?

[01:12:38]  Bruce: And you just explained exactly why. For the simple truth is that the relationship matters more than trying to convince people of the truth. At some level, we all know this, even if we sometimes forget it in practice. This very fact seems like a tacit answer to the question I was actually posing, okay? That it really does not make sense to try to rip away somebody's false belief. Here we're assuming it even is a false belief.

[01:13:08]  Unidentified speaker: I'm not convinced of that.

[01:13:10]  Bruce: But rip away somebody's false belief that's actually comforting to them as they're dying, okay? And maybe we're not even talking about when you're dying. I'm intentionally picking a circumstance that makes this as bold lines around it as we possibly can to make a point, okay?

[01:13:26]  Unidentified speaker: We all kind of get this.

[01:13:27]  Bruce: We get that the world is a complicated place and that it really would be an immoral act to say, well, rationally you'd be better off if you didn't believe in an afterlife. Here we're assuming that there is no afterlife for the sake of the hypothetical.

[01:13:44]  Unidentified speaker: It just doesn't even make sense, right?

[01:13:45]  Bruce: Like it literally is just a bad thing to do. It's an immoral thing to do, okay? And we all kind of just know that. So instead the right thing is to ask the question, how best should I interact with this person? Let me say, I found it interesting that he intentionally turned a checkable theory built on a universal law into a purely metaphysical theory that couldn't be tested or checked. And what I have in mind here is where he says, you know, who knows, maybe it would come up in conversation. Well, of course, that's not even the question I'm asking. I'm asking really, would it make sense to try to talk her out of it? It's got nothing to do with whether you should or shouldn't talk about your personal beliefs with this person. It might make perfect sense to talk to a Christian about how you don't, if you're an atheist, you don't believe in an afterlife. That isn't the subject that was under discussion, or at least it wasn't what I was offering in the thought experiment.

[01:14:40]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:14:41]  Bruce: So why did he throw that on there?

[01:14:45]  Unidentified speaker: Let me put this in a way that I think will make it very clear.

[01:14:48]  Bruce: I was in essence criticizing the following universal law. I was trying to show a problem with the following universal law.

[01:14:57]  Unidentified speaker: And here it is.

[01:14:58]  Bruce: It is always the case that it is better to know the truth than to be deceived by a delusion. I'm offering a proposed counter-example to that law. I'm refuting that law as universal. The fact is, is that it is rarely, if ever a good idea to rip away from a dying person a belief in heaven and replace it with a belief that death is just the end. When phrased in this way, it seems pretty obvious that the proposed universal law does not survive counter-examples. So instead, what he tried to replace it with was, well, who knows?

[01:15:31]  Unidentified speaker: Maybe it will come up in conversation.

[01:15:33]  Bruce: So this is no longer a theory that is a universal law.

[01:15:36]  Unidentified speaker: It's an existential theory.

[01:15:38]  Bruce: So there is no possible way to disprove it by counter-example. It's a theory intentionally designed to be resistant to refutation.

[01:15:45]  Unidentified speaker: Many will understand why I'm saying this.

[01:15:47]  Bruce: I'm invoking Popper's asymmetry of falsification versus verification. A theory that is a universal law can only be falsified and never verified, but a theory that is an existential statement can only be verified and can't be falsified. So the theory, who knows, maybe it will come up in conversation, can only be verified and can't be falsified, thereby making it a less criticizable to its counterpart. Let me make this even a little bit more clear, and I'm sorry I'm dwelling on this. This is not really the happiest subject, and it's something that's very personal for me because I'm going through this right now. And it is something that is on my mind because I am a rationalist, and it's something that crosses my mind all the time. You know, my commitment to religion versus my commitment to rationalism. There is a story, this is, I came across on Quora.

[01:16:43]  Unidentified speaker: You know, on Quora, you ask questions.

[01:16:44]  Bruce: Somebody asked, how would an atheist ever possibly comfort a dying person, you know, with their beliefs?

[01:16:53]  Unidentified speaker: You know, a dying Christian or a dying person who believed in an afterlife.

[01:16:56]  Bruce: So, the question was clearly meant as an attack on atheists. But one very clever atheist figured out a way to turn it into an attack on the religious person asking the question. So, here's the story that the atheist told on Quora. The atheist was working with a dying child.

[01:17:14]  Unidentified speaker: The child was scared.

[01:17:15]  Bruce: The child admitted to this atheist that her apparently Christian parents had told her about heaven and it sounded dry and scary. And so, she was scared of dying because of this.

[01:17:28]  Unidentified speaker: So, what did the atheist do?

[01:17:30]  Bruce: The atheist lied to the child and told…

[01:17:32]  Unidentified speaker: she said…

[01:17:33]  Bruce: used the word lie, by the way, and told the child that there was an afterlife, but it was full of clowns and princesses and things that a child would find appealing. So, she told the child exactly what the child wanted to hear to comfort the child as much as possible because the child is dying.

[01:17:48]  Unidentified speaker: That was just the right thing to do.

[01:17:51]  Bruce: The atheist, writing on Quora, then spared no expense using the story to show why it's actually religious people that are wrong to insist on their belief in heaven in a situation like this because that was just scary for the child and it wasn't helpful. By comparison, the atheist was pointing out that she was free to lie about whatever afterlife was necessary to comfort the child. So, touche, you know, she actually did a fairly good job of turning that question, which I think really was kind of a question stated in malice towards atheists, into a response that was malice back to the person who had made the question. It's interesting though that this answer is more than a bit self-undermining. If my friend had been willing to take the thought experiment, what it really does is it exposes a potential problem with rationality that is difficult, but I'm going to say not impossible to solve. It is a problem that, at least on the surface, seems like the true and the good do not always—it seems like the true and the good do not always align. This is an idea that dates back at least as far back as Plato. So it's not like some idea I'm coming up with.

[01:19:01]  Peter: This is just the trolley problem, right? Conflict between utilitarianism and deontological morality, right?

[01:19:10]  Bruce: So that might be a subset of this problem.

[01:19:14]  Unidentified speaker: So the idea of the true and the good.

[01:19:15]  Bruce: So let me try to find an example that isn't... I mean, the one example I'm using with a dying person, that's a good example here.

[01:19:23]  Unidentified speaker: Do we mean assuming...

[01:19:25]  Peter: Do we lie to the dying child to make them feel better? Or do we tell them the truth?

[01:19:33]  Unidentified speaker: That's right.

[01:19:33]  Peter: That seems like what the heart of the matter is. But I don't have an easy answer. But for myself, I guess for myself, though, if I was dying, I would probably want people around me to at least tell me their idea of what's true.

[01:19:56]  Unidentified speaker: I will say that.

[01:19:58]  Bruce: But you'd be open to either way, right?

[01:20:00]  Unidentified speaker: Whatever their belief was.

[01:20:02]  Unidentified speaker: Well, sure.

[01:20:03]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:20:04]  Peter: But I would want to be surrounded by truth.

[01:20:10]  Bruce: By people who tell their truth about their beliefs.

[01:20:12]  Unidentified speaker: About what they believe, sure.

[01:20:13]  Bruce: As opposed to what this atheist did with lying to the child.

[01:20:17]  Unidentified speaker: I'm not a child, though.

[01:20:19]  Unidentified speaker: And it's just complicated.

[01:20:23]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:20:25]  Bruce: So, I'm going to give a few more examples here, what I mean by the true and the good do not always align. Or it seems that the true and the good do not always align.

[01:20:34]  Unidentified speaker: I'm not making the claim that they don't always align.

[01:20:36]  Unidentified speaker: I'm saying that it may seem like they do not.

[01:20:40]  Bruce: And that's a problem that has to be addressed. So, we intuitively know that you do not rip away from, like, a dying child, their belief in an afterlife, that this would be an immoral act. And it seems to be the case, even if you sincerely believe it is rational to not believe in an afterlife. So, I say seems because, honestly, I'm not sold on this idea personally. But my purpose wasn't to argue that it was true, it was to help my crit-rat friend understand the problem Popper was struggling with when he said reason was based on faith, or at least the problem I think Popper was struggling with. So even my crit-rat friend shows signs of clearly understanding this problem, even though he wouldn't discuss it. The very fact that he would change the subject and not address the subject head on is a sort of tacit understanding that this is an issue, okay? The answer really is uncomfortable, and I don't blame him for wanting to change the subject and instead talk about, well, how should you relate to an individual? I have a term for this supposed idea that falsehoods can be better than truth. I call them high-utility falsehoods. This is a philosophical idea that is worthy of understanding and making sense of and trying to solve the problem of their possible existence. I don't know that I believe high-utility falsehoods do exist, but one could definitely argue for their existence, okay? So I say possible existence because, in fact, it may be that high-utility falsehoods simply do not exist at all. It's actually, strangely as this may sound, a matter of cosmology.

[01:22:26]  Bruce: So we can imagine realities where high-utility falsehoods do exist, that they're logically consistent worlds. All the major world religions have some sort of cosmology that gets rid of high-utility falsehoods. In fact, I would even dare say that's one of the main purposes of religion, is to create a mythology that gets rid of high-utility falsehoods. But we can just as easily imagine realities where they do exist, and that that's part of just how reality actually is. So what do high-utility falsehoods have to do with belief in reason and rationality? So I suspect the connection is mostly obvious, but if not, reason and rationality are proposed methods of finding the truth. Religion or tradition is also often a proposed method of finding the truth. So if high-utility falsehoods do exist, not claiming they do, in a cosmology where reason and rationality are in fact the best way to find the truth, then this leads to a potential problem in that it is no longer clear if we should want to find the truth all the time. So this is the basis for the Lovecraftian view of reality. So Lovecraft, he took this idea that the true and the good do not align, and that the truth can actually be bad, and that a delusion could be better. And he built his entire horror mythos from this intriguing idea, okay?

[01:23:59]  Unidentified speaker: Is this just your interpretation of Lovecraft, or is this a common thing?

[01:24:03]  Unidentified speaker: [No, he's written about it?]

[01:24:04]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, okay, okay, [that's just crazy?]

[01:24:07]  Bruce: He talks about, so understand Lovecraft was someone who was mentally ill, right?

[01:24:12]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, like, that's what we would say today.

[01:24:14]  Unidentified speaker: I'm not sure they had an understanding of that back then.

[01:24:16]  Unidentified speaker: He was depressed.

[01:24:17]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:24:18]  Bruce: And he just sort of found a lot of life kind of horrifying. And he talked about how his writings about the horrors of life through the symbology of elder gods and things like that was very comforting to him.

[01:24:33]  Unidentified speaker: I'd have to go find the actual quote.

[01:24:37]  Bruce: Someone who might be even a better example is Thomas Ligotti, who's thought of as the modern Lovecraft. His stories are really straightforwardly about the horrors of life, where he'll write about a horror story about what it's like to have to go to work every day. And this symbolism, the horror elements and the real life elements overlap in such a way that you do not—[meet you?] It's impossible to miss, he's actually talking about real life. And by the way, again, Thomas Ligotti is mentally ill, and his life is horrifying. And so he's writing about what his life is actually like. So this idea of high utility falsehoods is not really an uncommon idea. I mean, you've probably never heard the term high utility falsehoods.

[01:25:21]  Unidentified speaker: I invented the term.

[01:25:22]  Bruce: The concept itself is a well-known idea dating way back, probably before Plato.

[01:25:28]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:25:29]  Bruce: And it's the idea that the true and the good diverge at times. Now, it seems like half of all movies and TV shows, they make some sort of moral dilemma into the story, where the main character can't decide if they need to tell the truth, or if the truth is just too hurtful to be worth telling. So, you know, Superman lying about a secret identity to protect his loved ones. I mean, this is super common in Hollywood, right? And often the hero comes to realize that the truth is just too hurtful and a lie. And often we're led to believe, by the way, the story is told, that this was the moral answer. Now, of course, Hollywood likes to also flip that. And they maybe just as often instead show how the lie caused the House of Cards to fall down and this little tiny, seemingly harmless lie that was meant to protect people instead destroyed everybody's lives or whatever. Hollywood tells both stories.

[01:26:24]  Unidentified speaker: They like to have it both ways.

[01:26:27]  Bruce: And honestly, fiction is a fantastic but safe way to explore the problem of high-utility falsehoods from the safety of your home. So I really kind of approve of the fact that Hollywood will explore this going both directions and that they don't always do it just one way or the other. So what does any of this have to do with Popper, Agassi and Fideism?

[01:26:47]  Unidentified speaker: So I'm glad you asked.

[01:26:48]  Bruce: Agassi tacitly or maybe not so tacitly tries to connect rationality to logic.

[01:26:55]  Unidentified speaker: And to a degree, he makes sense.

[01:26:56]  Bruce: Sure, logic is how we cash out all rational arguments. So there seems to be a tacit argument here, maybe, that Agassi isn't merely offering a working hypothesis but a best current theory hypothesis. Though he never actually claims this.

[01:27:15]  Unidentified speaker: But when I read his paper, I just can't help but feel that he's intending for you to get that feeling.

[01:27:20]  Bruce: The problem being that a working hypothesis, as I said, might be an initial conjecture, that you're attached to enough to take the risk of exploring it further, or it might be a hypothesis that you adopted because there was no better alternative available. And I can't help but feel that Agassi is hoping for an argument by analogy. And here's what I think the analogy he's arguing is. And again, it depends on how you interpret Agassi.

[01:27:44]  Unidentified speaker: Maybe I'm wrong about this.

[01:27:46]  Unidentified speaker: I think the argument is this.

[01:27:48]  Bruce: Logic is a current best theory and a current working hypothesis.

[01:27:53]  Unidentified speaker: And it's similar with reason.

[01:27:57]  Unidentified speaker: So why similar to reason?

[01:27:59]  Bruce: So why can't reason also be a best working theory, a working hypothesis and a best current theory?

[01:28:05]  Unidentified speaker: So let's assume just for the sake of argument, this is his intent.

[01:28:07]  Unidentified speaker: And let's analyze this argument.

[01:28:10]  Bruce: So I find Agassi's approach here unsatisfying in that I can't tell if he's actually arguing for this or not. But let's use logic as an example here. So let's take the rule, if A, then B.

[01:28:25]  Unidentified speaker: Given A, therefore we know B.

[01:28:28]  Bruce: Now, I do not attempt to prove that correct or justify it. I simply propose it as a working hypothesis that you're welcome to try to refute. But I'm proposing that it universally holds as part of my conjecture. So if you can give me a counter example to that, I'm clearly refuted. I suspect you won't be able to give me a counter example to that. You're welcome to offer an alternative theory of logic, so long as I get to criticize it too. But I think this is basically an impossible task. This is why logic isn't merely a working hypothesis, it is a best-current theory, okay? There are no known counter examples to logic.

[01:29:13]  Unidentified speaker: That's why it's a best-current theory.

[01:29:16]  Bruce: But the possible existence of high-utility falsehoods calls into question if reason and rationality have an equivalent best theory status as logic does. To use what I think is a better analogy here, it's like we discovered that in real life, sometimes if A implies B and we know A, B occasionally just isn't true anyhow.

[01:29:38]  Unidentified speaker: Not very often, but occasionally.

[01:29:41]  Bruce: That doesn't actually happen in real life, but what if it did? Because of this, I'm going to boldly declare that adopting reason does not have a best theory status because there are competing theories of how to live one's life that seem to have not yet been refuted as inferior life choices, even though they may be less rational at times. To prove that, let's start with the assumption that there is a universal law that rationality and reason are always the better choice. It seems to be trivially easy to come up with counter examples to this supposed universal law, thus refuting it, such as the ones we've been discussing, plus the hundreds of thousands of Hollywood movies that are about this. You might convince me that it is usually the best policy for individuals to be rational, maybe even overwhelmingly so. But if this is true, then clearly it must be rational to only accept reason if it is of positive utility for us, which seems undermining to the idea of reason. So as Agassi points out, Fideism simply does not see rationality as authoritative. It doesn't, that doesn't mean we're not claiming you should, should always be irrational. So there's a well-known term for terms that are used for this problem. It's the idea of epistemic rationality versus instrumental rationality.

[01:31:02]  Unidentified speaker: Those are not terms I invented.

[01:31:04]  Bruce: Epistemic rationality is how you would normally think of rationality. It's about how to best go about being rational so that you come to the truth. And instrumental rationality is more like what we mean when, in like in economics, when we claim everyone's a rational actor. We simply mean that we expect them to know what they want and value the most, and that really nobody else gets to decide that for them, okay? But we're not necessarily claiming that it's rational—[in/and what?]—their actions are rational in an epistemic sense, okay? So Hollywood's obsession with true, the true and the good diverging, is really an obsession with the potential storytelling possibilities that come out of the interesting apparent fact that there are two kinds of rationality that can diverge. Does this mean that rationality is, in fact, not always a best policy? Well, I'm not convinced of that, nor am I claiming it. But I am claiming that Popper was right that the choice to adopt a rational view is, in fact, a leap of faith. Or to put it another way, the choice to be rational in the epistemic sense is not currently a best theory about how to live your life. In other words, instrumental rationality. If you choose to live your life that way, you did not do so by reasoning into that position, for that is currently impossible. And here I'm also assuming that you're not just fooling yourself because, of course, everybody claims that they're rational. You know, literally everybody, no matter how irrational, claims that they're rational.

[01:32:34]  Bruce: So the choice to be rational, I'm kind of assuming that it's like you're really actually taking a critical attitude and you're not simply fooling yourself into thinking you're taking a critical attitude. So Popper was correct, in my view, that there is an act of faith to choose to be reasonable, or to choose rationality and reason as a way to live your life. That at least currently that is necessary to do that as an act of faith. Now, I admire Popper that he both recognized this truth and was bold enough to put it into writing, even though it's practically guaranteed that he was going to take flak from his own students and nearly everyone else that considered themselves to be rationalists. So now, based on all this, was Popper a Fideist?

[01:33:23]  Unidentified speaker: So let's go back to the original question.

[01:33:25]  Unidentified speaker: Was Popper a Fideist?

[01:33:26]  Bruce: Well, it depends on what you mean by Fideist. Surely he isn't the kind that claims that starting axioms are arbitrary, nor am I, for that matter. Agassi essentially argued that if Popper is a Fideist, that he's an improved kind. But I feel it goes too far to assume the word Fideist must have a single essential meaning. Popper was advocating for there being no way for rationality to be comprehensive, and he was right about that if we're talking about instrumentalist rationality. Bartley and arguably Agassi were therefore wrong in this regard.

[01:34:02]  Unidentified speaker: Or were they?

[01:34:03]  Unidentified speaker: See, here's the problem.

[01:34:05]  Bruce: I think the simple truth is that Bartley and Agassi were arguing for, yes, critical rationalism is comprehensive, but they really only meant epistemic rationality. And I think maybe they're actually correct about that, if you actually just mean epistemic rationality. But if you actually mean also instrumental rationality, which is now the question of how to live your life, then I think it actually is not comprehensive, for the reasons I've just explained, and that in fact there is a leap of faith.

[01:34:39]  Unidentified speaker: Now, which was Popper talking about?

[01:34:41]  Bruce: Well, he was talking about the choice to accept rationality as a critical attitude, as a form of how to live your life. Therefore, he was talking about instrumental rationality, not epistemic rationality. So my opinion is, both parties are actually correct, but over different kinds of rationality. But Popper was more correct in that Bartley and Agassi don't seem to quite understand that Popper was talking about instrumentalist rationality, and they're only talking about epistemic rationality, and they don't even really seem to consider instrumentalist rationality.

[01:35:25]  Unidentified speaker: But you really need to.

[01:35:26]  Bruce: It's kind of a really important question. Because we are talking about the subject of, should you adapt rationality as a basis for your life?

[01:35:35]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, that is an instrumental question, not an epistemic question.

[01:35:40]  Peter: But shouldn't we strive to make those align? I mean, don't you think that's a worthy pursuit, to live based on good philosophy?

[01:35:51]  Unidentified speaker: So that's a really good question.

[01:35:53]  Unidentified speaker: And I honestly think that's a question of cosmology.

[01:35:57]  Bruce: I think if we live in the right kind of cosmology, the answer to your question is yes.

[01:36:02]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:36:02]  Unidentified speaker: It all comes back to heat death, right?

[01:36:04]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:36:05]  Bruce: So I think if we live in a Lovecraftian, if we live in Lovecraftian cosmology, so that would be elder gods that want to breed us or something.

[01:36:13]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:36:13]  Bruce: You know, then the answer is no, we should not try to make them align.

[01:36:17]  Unidentified speaker: That would actually be a mistake.

[01:36:18]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:36:19]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:36:20]  Unidentified speaker: Well, that's a really good answer, actually.

[01:36:22]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:36:24]  Bruce: So there's kind of a leap of faith that we live in the right kind of cosmology, where we should try to make them align. And I do think that is what it means to be a rationalist.

[01:36:34]  Peter: Well, this ties into our last episode about the inherently meaningful universe versus one ruled by entropy. Is that, you know, so if we live in an inherently meaningful universe, we want to, our instrumentalist rationality and epistemic rationality to align. Whereas if we live in something else, a Lovecraftian universe, then there's no point in that.

[01:37:05]  Unidentified speaker: Is that what you're saying?

[01:37:06]  Unidentified speaker: That's exactly what I'm saying.

[01:37:07]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:37:08]  Bruce: Honestly, I don't see how it could be anything but that. If somebody sincerely thinks they could make an argument that if you live in a universe full of elder gods that want to breed you, that you should still be out there seeking the truth using rationality. Like, honestly, that just isn't the case, right?

[01:37:25]  Unidentified speaker: Like, it's not.

[01:37:27]  Bruce: So it would be a stupid argument to make because you're wrong. And it's really easy to refute you using reason. So it really does come back down to our cosmology, right? You are making cosmological assumptions when you try to make this choice. And those cosmological assumptions, they probably are based on faith at this point.

[01:37:49]  Unidentified speaker: I don't think they have to be.

[01:37:51]  Unidentified speaker: Like, I could imagine a universe.

[01:37:53]  Bruce: I could even imagine in our future, where we reach a point where we understand our cosmology well enough, that it becomes obvious that we do live in an inherently meaningful universe, and therefore it makes perfect sense to align, you know, instrumental and epistemic rationality.

[01:38:10]  Unidentified speaker: But I don't think we're there.

[01:38:12]  Bruce: Like even the proposal like the Omega Point is an attempt to get those aligned, and it was refuted. Like it's not a best theory status at this point, okay? So I do think at this point, we are making a faith leap.

[01:38:27]  Unidentified speaker: I think that's the way it is, right?

[01:38:30]  Unidentified speaker: I do think that's not the end of the world.

[01:38:32]  Bruce: I think that rationalists who buck against this, I think they're being irrational when they do that, by the way. I think they're being religionists when they do that. But I think that coming to accept like Popper did, yeah, there's a faith leap here going on.

[01:38:50]  Unidentified speaker: I think that's something you can do.

[01:38:51]  Unidentified speaker: Popper did it, so can you, right?

[01:38:53]  Bruce: It's not really the end of the world. So let me say this then. Was Popper a Fideist? I think Bartley was accusing him of being a kind of Fideist that he wasn't and therefore Bartley was wrong. And I don't blame Popper for being angry that he was being accused of this false view that he didn't hold. But I do think he is a Fideist. Like if you are willing to accept that there is such a thing as this benign form of Fideism that Agassi admits exists, then I do think Popper fits that definition well. Therefore, I would say that at least this benign form of Fideism, that is what Popper is, okay? So is critical rationalism comprehensive? Popper argued no, Bartley argued yes, Agassi seems to have argued yes, sort of. And again, I think it does depend on what you mean by rationality. If you mean epistemic rationality, I think probably Bartley is correct that epistemic rationality is comprehensive. Critical rationalism can, if you are only looking at epistemic examples, can count as a best theory status, not a mere working hypothesis, because I don't know of a better alternative to it, and I can give you several reasons why the alternatives are worse. And so if you're only looking at epistemic rationality, I think you can make a really good case that Bartley and Agassi are correct. But the moment you allow for instrumental rationality, and I cannot overemphasize this, it is the more important rationality, okay? The moment you allow for it, I think Popper is entirely right, and they were mistaken, okay?

[01:40:36]  Bruce: I think probably the most generous thing I can do here, charitable read, is to say they're both right, but one was talking about epistemic rationality, and one was talking about instrumental rationality.

[01:40:48]  Unidentified speaker: So I'm going to go with that.

[01:40:49]  Bruce: That's probably the most generous charitable answer I can give to both Bartley and Popper here.

[01:40:57]  Unidentified speaker: Why am I a Fideist?

[01:40:58]  Bruce: It's because I honestly think it's the best, the current best theory, right? Like I don't think there's a better theory to Fideism, but I do think you have to take the benign version that Agassi's talking about, and that's the one I'm advocating for, okay? And I want to say again, I wouldn't blame anyone for not being a Fideist, because you know what?

[01:41:18]  Unidentified speaker: We do kind of suck.

[01:41:19]  Bruce: We're saying things nobody wants to hear. We're unpopular with all sides. It just happens to be true, or at least by true I of course mean the best current theory. So that's why I am one. As a side note, the fact that Popper did view rationality as a type of religion is what allowed Popper to say things like this. So these are some really great quotes that I took from him that I think go really well with our last podcast where we talked about Popper's views of God, right? So this is from The Open Society and Its Enemies, Section 24, which is [Ocular/Oracular?] Philosophy and the Revolt Against Reason, Subsection V or 5. He says, I do not wish to be misunderstood. I feel no hostility towards religious mysticism, only towards a militant, anti-rationalist intellectualism, and I should be the first to fight any attempt to oppress it. It is not I who advocates religious intolerance, but I claim that faith in reason or rationalism or humanitarianism or humanism has the same right as any other creed to contribute to an improvement of human affairs.

[01:42:28]  Unidentified speaker: That's a great quote.

[01:42:29]  Unidentified speaker: Let me give you another one.

[01:42:31]  Bruce: So he did see rationalism, though he saw it as a kind of faith, he did see it as being very competitive with other kinds of religions or meaning memes. So he went on to say, and this is section, same chapter, but section four now, he says, the 19th century conflict between science and religion appears to me to be superseded. Since an uncritical rationalism is inconsistent, the problem cannot be the choice between knowledge and faith, but only between two kinds of faith. The new problem is, which is the right faith and which is the wrong faith? What I have tried to show is that the choice with which you are confronted is between a faith in reason and in human individuals and a faith in the mystical faculties of man by which he is united [to be a collective?], and that this choice is the same as the choice between an attitude that recognizes the unity of mankind and an attitude that divides men into friends and foes, into masters and slaves. In addition, Popper felt comfortable with the idea that the claim of... So this is on mysticism and religion, but the claim of traditionalists that you do not always... Traditionalists always argue that you don't want to do away with tradition or harm it because it may cause society to collapse. Okay, this is like a really common claim. Agassi talks about this in his paper. Popper took this criticism as being worthy of respect, which may surprise a lot of people.

[01:44:05]  Unidentified speaker: But here's the actual quote.

[01:44:07]  Bruce: Conjecture and refutation, this is chapter 19, the history of our time an optimist view. I may confess that in the issue of faith in man and distrust of man, my feelings are all on the side of the naive liberal optimist, even though my reason tells me that their epistemology was all wrong and that truth is in fact hard to come by. I'm repelled by the idea of keeping men under tutelage and authority, but I must admit on the other hand that the pessimists who feared the decline of authority and tradition were wise men. The terrible experience of the great religious wars and of the French and Russian revolutions prove their wisdom and foresight. So I think it was the fact that Popper did see critical rationalism as ultimately being an article of faith is what allowed him to be able to see things like this, to see the complex nuances that actually exist in real life over the struggle of tradition versus criticism, over the struggle of religion versus science, things like this, right? And to come up with, you know, you can't say Popper was necessarily friendly to religion. He was super critical of it if he felt it did something wrong, right? But he was able to take a really complex nuanced view of it. And I find it very admirable the way he came up with this, why he did it, his reasoning for it. And I even find the view he ultimately settled into to be a very good view. I don't know if I'm prepared to say it's the best view. I suspect there's multiple views that could vie for that title. But I find it to be one that's a very strong merit, if that makes any sense.

[01:45:49]  Unidentified speaker: And that's it.

[01:45:50]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:45:51]  Peter: Well, thank you, Bruce. That was extremely interesting analysis of that paper. And how did you find that paper anyway? Did someone send it to you or is this something you've known about for a while?

[01:46:04]  Bruce: So probably a couple months ago, I was talking with a CritRat about whether Bartley was correct on his criticism of Popper. And he was very staunchly that Bartley was correct. He said Popper advocated for uncritically accepting certain axioms.

[01:46:22]  Unidentified speaker: That's obviously false.

[01:46:23]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, he was explaining this to me.

[01:46:25]  Unidentified speaker: And I said, you know what?

[01:46:26]  Bruce: I'm not actually sure that Popper ever actually said any of that, or that Bartley correctly understood what Popper was saying. And then like the next day, somebody mentioned that Agassi wrote a paper about the dispute. I'm like, give me that paper.

[01:46:48]  Unidentified speaker: So I got the paper.

[01:46:49]  Unidentified speaker: I downloaded it.

[01:46:50]  Unidentified speaker: I didn't read it.

[01:46:51]  Unidentified speaker: I do that a lot.

[01:46:52]  Bruce: I download a paper I'm going to read later that I'm planning to do a podcast on, but I haven't read it yet. And I decided, I talked with you and I said, oh, let's do a podcast on this paper. But I didn't know what the content was when I decided to do that. And then I started to read the paper. And I suddenly realized, whoa, by strange coincidence, this is totally a sequel to our last podcast.

[01:47:15]  Peter: Yeah, well, good find with the Fideism link and the meaningful versus Lovecraftian Universe link. So yes, well done, Bruce.

[01:47:27]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.

[01:47:28]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[01:47:28]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.

[01:47:30]  Unidentified speaker: Bye bye.

[01:47:30]  Unidentified speaker: Bye bye.

[01:47:38]  Unidentified speaker: Hello again.

[01:47:39]  Peter: If you've made it this far, please consider giving us a nice rating on whatever platform you use, or even making a financial contribution through the link provided in the show notes. As you probably know, we are a podcast loosely tied together by the Popper, Deutsch, Theory of Knowledge. We believe David Deutsch's Four Strands tie everything together. So we discuss science, knowledge, computation, politics, art, and especially the search for artificial general intelligence. Also, please consider connecting with Bruce on X at BNielsen01. Also, please consider joining the Facebook group, The Many Worlds of David Deutsch, where Bruce and I first started connecting.

[01:48:22]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.